The Liberal Arts, the Campus, and the Biosphere:
An Alternative to Bloom’s Vision of Education
by
David W. Orr

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Orr, David W. "The Liberal Arts, the Campus, and the Biosphere: An Alternative to Bloom’s Vision of Education." Harvard Educational Review 60 (2): 205-216.

Debates about the content and purposes of education are mostly conducted among committees of the learned conditioned to such fare. Allan Bloom changed all of that in 1987 by writing a best-seller on the subject. Professor Bloom, as far as I can tell, believes that questions about the content of education (i.e., curriculum) were settled some time ago; perhaps once and for all with Plato, but certainly no later than Nietzsche. Subsequent elaborations, revisions and refinements have worked great mischief with the high culture he purports to defend. Bloom's discontent focuses on American youth. He finds them empty, intellectually slack, and morally ignorant. The "soil" of their souls is "unfriendly" to the higher learning. And he thinks no more highly of their music and sexual relationships.

In Professor Bloom's ideal academy, students of a higher sort would spend a great deal of time reading the Great Books, a list no longer universally admired. Bloom's avowed aim is to "reconstitute the idea of an educated human being and establish a liberal education again." But after 344 pages of verbal pyrotechnics--some illuminating the landscape, others merely the psyche of Professor Bloom--he leaves us only with some variation on the Great Books approach to education. The classics, he argues, "provide the royal road to the students' hearts. ..their gratitude [for being so exposed is] ...boundless. " Exclusion of the classics, he thinks, has culminated in an "intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude which constitutes the crisis of our civilization. " Lesser minds might have related the crisis to more pedestrian causes such as violence, nuclear weapons, technology, overpopulation, or injustice. No matter. All of this was revealed to Professor Bloom while on the faculty at Cornell during the student uprising in 1969. One may reasonably infer that Professor Bloom and his Great Books were not at that moment treated kindly. One may also infer that Professor Bloom has neither forgiven nor forgotten.

Bloom has been widely attacked as a snob and as having totally misunderstood what America is all about. In his defense, there is no reasonable case to be made against the inclusion of ancient wisdom in any good, liberal education. Nor can there be any good argument against the "idea of an educated human being." But questions about which ancient wisdom we might profitably consult, and about the intellectual and moral qualities of the educated person, have not been settled once and for all with Professor Bloom's book. At the end we know a great deal of what Professor Bloom is against, some of which is justified, but little of what he is for.

His vagueness about ends suggests that Professor Bloom, without saying so, regards education as an end in itself. In a time of global turmoil, what transcendent purposes will Bloom's academy serve? In a time of great wrongs, what injustices does he wish to right? In an age of senseless violence, what civil disorders and dangers does he intend to resolve? In a time of anomie and purposelessness, what higher qualities of mind and character does he propose to cultivate? A careful reading of The Closing of the American Mind offers little insight about such matters. Rather, it is indicative of the closure of the purely academic mind to ecological issues.

For all of his conspicuous erudition, Professor Bloom seems to regard the liberal arts as an abstraction. For example, rather than merely "reconstitute the idea" of educated human beings, why not actually educate a large number of them? Likewise, his reverence for the classics is not accompanied by any suggestion of how they might illuminate the major issues of the day. The effect is ironically to render them both sacred and unusable, except for purposes of conspicuous pedantry. It also distorts our understanding of the origins of some of humanity's best thinking. Many of what are now described as classics were produced by the friction of extraordinary minds wrestling with the problems of their day, which is to say that they were relevant in their time. Plato wrote The Republic in part as a response to the breakdown of civic order in fourth-century Athens. Locke wrote his Two Treatises to justify the English civil war. Only in hindsight does their work appear to have the immaculate qualities that they certainly lacked at birth. The progress of human thought has been hard-fought, uneven, and erratic. We have reason to believe that it will continue to be so. If our descendants five centuries hence regard any books of our era as classics, they will be those that grappled with and illuminated the major issues of our time, in a manner that illuminates theirs. Beyond complaints about education, Professor Bloom does not offer an opinion about what these issues may be. He sounds rather like a fussy museum curator, irate over gum wrappers on the floor.

Amidst growing poverty, environmental deterioration, and violence in a nuclear-armed world, Professor Bloom is silent about how his version of the liberal arts would promote global justice, heal the breech with the natural world, promote peace, and restore meaning in a technocratic world. On the contrary, he arrogantly dismisses those concerned about such issues. Yet, ironically, if our era adds any "classics " to the archeology of human thought, they will more likely than not be written about these subjects.

It is now widely acknowledged that the classics of the Western tradition are deficient in certain respects. First, having been mostly composed by white males, they exclude the vast majority of human experience. Moreover, there are problems that this tradition has not successfully resolved, either because they are of recent origin, or because they were regarded as unimportant. In the latter category is the issue of the human role in the natural world. Search as one may through Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the authors of the Great Books, there is not much said about it. With a few exceptions such as Hesiod, Cicero, Spinoza, and St. Francis (who wrote no "Great Book"), what wisdom we have from Western sources begins with the likes of Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh in the middle years of the last century. Whatever timeless qualities human nature mayor may not have, Western culture has not offered much enlightenment on the appropriate relationship between humanity and its habitat. Nor does Professor Bloom.

Professor Bloom, I believe, has also missed something basic about education. Whitehead put it this way: "First-hand knowledge is the ultimate basis of intellectual life. ...The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity. It is tame because it has never been scared by the facts. " An immersion in the classics, however valuable for some parts of intellectual development, risks no confrontation with the facts of life. The aim of education is not the ability to score well on tests, do well in Trivial Pursuit, or even to quote the right classic on the appropriate pedagogical occasion. The aim of education is life lived to its fullest. A study of the classics is one tool among many to this end.
The purpose of a liberal education has to do with the development of the whole person. J. Glenn Gray describes this person as "one who has fully grasped the simple fact that his self is fully implicated in those beings around him, human and nonhuman, and who has learned to care deeply about them." Accordingly, its function is the development of the capacity for clear thought and compassion in the recognition of the interrelatedness of life.

And what do these mean in an age of violence, injustice, ecological deterioration, and nuclear weapons? What does wholeness mean in an age of specialization? It is perhaps easier to begin with what they do not mean. We do not lack for bad models: the careerist, the "itinerant professional vandal" devoid of any sense of place, the yuppie, the narrow specialist, the intellectual snob. In different ways, these all too common role models of the 1980s lack the capacity to relate their autobiography to the unfolding history of their time in a meaningful, positive way. They simply cannot speak to the urgent needs of the age, which is to say that they have been educated to be irrelevant. In Gray's words, they have not grasped "the simple fact" of their implicatedness, nor have they learned to "care deeply" about anything beyond themselves. To the extent that this has become the typical product of our educational institutions, it is an indictment of enormous gravity. Professor Bloom's emphasis on the classics and preservation of high culture does not remedy this dereliction in any obvious way.

It might be possible to dismiss Professor Bloom as a harmless crank were it not for the wide impact of his book, and because he has become a spokesman for the powerful. The problem is not with Professor Bloom's ideas, which are toothless enough. The danger lies in the combination of vagueness, surliness, and the large number of things that he does not say. The result is that Closing can be cited by any number of ill-informed proponents of bad causes wanting to exit the twentieth century backwards. Bloom has not provided any coherent vision of the liberal arts relevant to our time. What he does offer is a sometimes insightful cultural critique in combination with a mummified curriculum with the distinct aroma of formaldehyde.

RECONSTRUCTION:
THE TASK OF THE LIBERAL ARTS

The mission of the liberal arts in our time is not merely to inculcate a learned appreciation for the classics, as Bloom would have it, or to transmit "marketable skills," as any number of others propose, but to develop balanced, whole persons. Wholeness, first, requires the integration of the personhood of the student: the analytic mind with feelings, the intellect with manual competence. Failure to connect mind and feelings, in Gray's words, "divorces us from our own dispositions at the level where intellect and emotions fuse." A genuinely liberal education will also connect the head and the hands. Technical education and liberal arts have been consigned to different institutions that educate different parts of the anatomy. What passes for the higher learning deals with the neck up and only half of that, technical schools the remainder. This division creates the danger that students in each, in Gray's words, "miss a whole area of relation to the world." For liberal arts students, it also under- mines an ancient source of good thought: the friction between an alert mind and practical experience. Abstract thought, '"mere book learning," in Whitehead's words, divorced from practical reality and the facts of life, promotes pedantry and mediocrity. It also produces half-formed or deformed persons: thinkers who cannot do, and doers who cannot think. Students typically leave sixteen years of formal education without ever having mastered a particular skill or without any specific manual competence, as if the act of making anything other than term papers is without pedagogic or developmental value.

Second, an education in the liberal arts must overcome what Whitehead termed "the fatal disconnection of subjects." The contemporary curriculum continues to divide reality into a cacophony of subjects that are seldom integrated into any coherent pattern. There is, as Whitehead reminds us, only one subject for education: "life in all its manifestations. " Yet we routinely unleash specialists on the world, armed with expert knowledge but untempered by any inkling of the essential relatedness of things. Worse, specialization undermines the ability to communicate "plainly, in the common tongue." The academy, with its disciplines, divisions, and multiplying professional jargons, has come to resemble not so much a university as a cacophony of different jargons. I do not believe that Whitehead overstated the case. Disconnectedness in the form of excessive specialization is fatal to comprehension because it removes knowledge from its larger context. Collection of data supersedes understanding of connecting patterns, which is, I believe, the essence of wisdom. It is no accident that connectedness is central to the meaning of the Greek root words for both ecology and religion, oikos and religio.

A third task of the liberal arts is to provide a sober view of the world, but without inducing despair. For many college freshmen, acquaintance with the realities of the late twentieth century comes as a shock. This is not the happy era they have heard described by a $120 billion-per-year advertising industry and by any number of feckless politicians. This is a time of danger, anomie, suffering, crack on the streets, changing climate, war, hunger, homelessness, spreading toxins, garbage barges plying the seven seas, desertification, poverty, and the permanent threat of Armageddon. Ours is the age of paradox. The modern obsession to control nature through science and technology is resulting in a less predictable and less bountiful natural world. Material progress was supposed to have created a more peaceful world. Instead, the twentieth century has been a time of unprecedented bloodshed in which two hundred million have died. Our economic growth has multiplied wants, not satisfactions. Amidst a staggering quantity of artifacts--what economists call abundance--there is growing poverty of the most desperate sort. How many student counseling services convey this sense of peril? Or obligation? The often-cited indifference and apathy of students is, I think, a reflection of the prior failure of educators and educational institutions to stand for anything beyond larger and larger endowments and an orderly campus. The result is a growing gap between the real world and the academy, and between the attitudes and aptitudes of its graduates and the needs of their time.

Finally, a genuine liberal arts education will equip a person to live well in a place. To a great extent, formal education now prepares its graduates to reside, not to dwell. The difference is important. The resident is a temporary and rootless occupant who mostly needs to know where the banks and stores are in order to plug in. The inhabitant and a particular habitat cannot be separated without doing violence to both. The sum total of violence wrought by people who do not know who they are because they do not know where they are is the global environmental crisis. To reside is to live as a transient and as a stranger to one's place, and inevitably to some part of the self. The inhabitant and place mutually shape each other. Residents, shaped by outside forces, become merely "consumers" supplied by invisible networks that damage their places and those of others. The inhabitant and the local community are parts of a system that meets real needs for food, materials, economic support, and sociability. The resident's world, on the contrary, is a complicated system that defies order, logic, and control. The inhabitant is part of a complex order that strives for harmony between human demands and ecological processes. The resident lives in a constant blizzard of possibilities engineered by other residents. The life of the inhabitant is governed by the boundaries of sufficiency, organic harmony, and by the discipline of paying attention to minute particulars. For the resident, order begins from the top and proceeds downward as law and policy. For the inhabitant, order begins with the self and proceeds outward. Knowledge for the resident is theoretical and abstract, akin to training. For inhabitants, knowledge in the art of living aims toward wholeness. Those who dwell can only be skeptical of those who talk about being global citizens before they have attended to the minute particulars of living well in their place.

LIBERAL ARTS AND THE CAMPUS

This bring me to the place where learning occurs, the campus. Do students in liberal arts colleges learn connectedness there or separation? Do they learn "implicatedness " or noninvolvement? And do they learn that they are "'only cogs in an ecological mechanism," as Aldo Leopold put it, or that they are exempt from the duties of any larger citizenship in the community of life? A genuine liberal arts education will foster a sense of connectedness, implicatedness, and ecological citizenship, and will provide the competence to act on such knowledge. In what kind of place can such an education occur? The typical campus is the place where knowledge of other things is conveyed. Curriculum is mostly imported from other locations, times, and domains of abstraction. The campus as land, buildings, and relationships is thought to have no pedagogic value, and for those intending to be residents it need have none. It is supposed to be attractive and convenient, without also being useful and instructive. A "nice" campus is one whose lawns and landscapes are well-manicured and whose buildings are kept clean and good repair by a poorly paid maintenance crew. From distant and unknown places the campus is automatically supplied with food, water, electricity, toilet paper, and whatever else. Its waste and garbage are transported to other equal1y unknown places.

And what learning occurs on a "nice" campus? First, without anyone saying as much, students learn the lesson of indifference to the ecology of their immediate place. Four years in a place cal1ed a campus culminates in no great understanding of the place, or in the art of living responsibly in that or any other place. I think it significant that students frequently refer to the outside world as the "real world," and do so without any feeling that this is not as it should be. The artificiality of the campus is not unrelated to the mediocrity of the learned world of which Whitehead complained. Students also learn indifference to the human ecology of the place and to certain kinds of people: those who clean the urinals, sweep the floors, haul out the garbage, and collect beer cans on Monday morning.

Indifference to a place is a matter of attention. The campus and its region are seldom brought into focus as a matter of practical study. To do so raises questions of the most basic sort. How does it function as an ecosystem? From where does its food, energy, water, and materials come and at what human and ecological cost? Where does its waste and garbage go? At what costs? What relation does the campus have to the surrounding region? What is the ecological history of the place? What ecological potentials does it have? What are the dominant soil types? Flora and fauna? And what of its geology and hydrology?

The study of place cultivates the habits of careful, close observation, and with it the ability to connect cause and effect. Aldo Leopold described the capacity in these terms:

Here is an abandoned field in which the ragweed is sparse and short. Does this tell us anything about why the mortgage was foreclosed? About how long ago? Would this field be a good place to look for quail? Does short ragweed have any connection with the human story behind yonder graveyard? If all the ragweed in this watershed were short, would that tell us anything about the future of floods in the stream? About the future prospects for bass or trout?

Second, students learn that it is sufficient only to learn about injustice and ecological deterioration without having to do much about them, which is to say, the lesson of hypocrisy. They hear that the vital signs of the planet are in decline without learning to question the de facto energy, food, materials, and waste policies of the very institution that presumes to induct them into responsible adulthood. Four years of consciousness-raising proceeds without connection to those remedies close at hand. Hypocrisy undermines the capacity for constructive action and so contributes to demoralization and despair.

Third, students learn that practical incompetence is de rigueur, since they seldom are required to solve problems that have consequences except for their grade point average. They are not provided opportunities to implement their studies in practical ways or to acquire the skills that would let them do so at a later time. Nor are they asked to make anything, it being presumed that material and mental creativity are unrelated. Homo faber and Homo sapiens are two distinct species, the former being an inferior sort that subsisted between the Neanderthal era and the founding of Harvard. The losses are not trivial: the satisfaction of good work and craftsmanship, the lessons of diligence and discipline, and the discovery of personal competence. After four years of the higher learning, students have learned that it is all right to be incompetent and that practical competence is decidedly inferior to the kind that helps to engineer leveraged buyouts and create tax breaks for people who do not need them. This is a loss of incalculable proportions both to the person-hood of the student and to the larger society. It is a loss to their intellectual powers and moral development that can mature only by interaction with real problems. It is a loss to the society burdened with a growing percentage of incompetent people, ignorant of why such competence is importance.

The conventional campus has become a place where indoor learning occurs as a preparation for indoor careers. The young of our advanced society are increasingly shaped by the shopping mall, the freeway, the television, and the computer. They regard nature, if they see it at all, as through a rearview mirror receding in the haze. We should not be astonished, then, to discover rates of ecological literacy in decline, at the very time that that literacy is most needed.

THE UPSHOT:
THE CAMPUS AND THE BIOSPHERE

Every educational institution processes not only ideas and students but resources, taking in food, energy, water, materials, and discarding organic and solid wastes. The sources (mines, wells, forests, farms, feedlots) and sinks (landfills, toxic dumps, sewage outfalls) are the least-discussed places in the contemporary curriculum. For the most part, these flows occur out of sight and mind of both students and faculty. Yet they are the most tangible connections between the campus and the world beyond. They also provide an extraordinary educational opportunity. The study of resource flows transcends disciplinary boundaries; it connects the foreground of experience with the background of larger issues and more distant places; and it joins empirical research on existing behavior and its consequences with the study of other and more desirable possibilities.

The study of institutional resource flows is aimed to determine how much of what comes from where, and with what human and ecological consequences. How many kilowatt hours of electricity from what power plants burning how much fuel extracted from where? What are the sources of food in the campus dining hall? Was it produced "sustainably" or not? Were farmers or laborers fairly paid or not? What forests are cut down to supply the college with paper? Were they replanted? Where does toxic waste from labs go? Or solid wastes?

The study of actual resource flows must be coupled with the study of alternatives that may be more humane, ethically solvent, ecologically sustainable, cheaper, and better for the regional economy. Are there other and better sources of food, energy, materials, water? The study of potentials must also address issues of conservation. How much does the institution waste? How much energy, water, paper, and materials can be conserved? What is the potential for recycling paper, materials, glass, aluminum, and other materials? Can organic wastes be composted on-site or recycled through solar aquatic systems? At what cost? Can the institution shift its buying power from national marketing systems to support local economies? How? In what areas? How quickly? Can the landscape be designed for educational rather than decorative purposes? To what extent can good landscaping minimize energy spent for cooling and heating?

To address these and related questions, the Meadow creek 26 Project conducted studies of the food systems of Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and Oberlin College in Ohio. Both institutions are served by nationwide food-brokering networks that are not sustainable and that tend to undermine regional economies. In the Hendrix study, for example, students discovered that the college was buying only nine percent of its food within the state. Beef came from Amarillo, Texas; rice from Mississippi. Yet the college is located in a cattle and rice-farming region. In both studies, students uncovered ample opportunities for the institutions to expand purchases of locally grown products. Not infrequently, these are fresher, less likely to be contaminated with chemicals, and, not surprisingly, they are cheaper because shipping costs are lower. In conducting the research, which involved travel to the farms and feedlots throughout the United States that supply the campus, students confronted basic issues in agriculture, social ethics, environmental quality, economics, and politics. They were also involved in the analysis of existing buying patterns while having to develop feasible alternatives in cooperation with college officials. The results were action-oriented, interdisciplinary, and aimed to generate practical results. Both colleges responded cooperatively in the implementation of plans to increase local buying. In the Hendrix case, in-state purchases doubled in the year following the study. Through video documentaries and articles in the campus newspaper, the studies became part of a wider campus dialogue. Finally, the willingness of both colleges to support local economies helps to bridge the gap between the institutions and their locality in away no public relations campaign could have done.

CONCLUSION

The study of institutional resource flows can lead to three results. The first is a set of policies governing food, energy, water, materials, architectural design, landscaping, and waste flows that meet standards for sustainability. A campus energy policy, for example, would set standards for conservation, while directing a shift toward the maximum use of both passive and active solar systems for hot water, space conditioning, and electricity. A campus food policy would give high priority to local and regional organic sources. A materials policy would aim to minimize solid waste and recycling. An architectural policy governing all new construction and renovation would give priority to solar design and the use of nontoxic and bioregionally available building materials. A landscape policy would stress the use of trees for cooling and windbreaks, and as a means to offset campus CO2 emissions. Decorative landscaping would be replaced by "edible landscaping." A campus waste policy, aimed to close waste loops, would lead to the development of on-site composting and the exploration of biological alternatives for handling waste water such as that being developed by John Todd.

The study of campus resource flows and the development of campus policies would lead to a second and more important result: the reinvigoration of a curriculum around the issues of human survival, a plausible foundation for the liberal arts. This emphasis would become a permanent part of the curriculum through research projects, courses, seminars, and the establishment of interdisciplinary programs in resource management or environmental studies. By engaging the entire campus community in the study of resource flows, debate about the possible meanings of sustainability, the design of campus resource policies, and curriculum innovation, the process carries with it the potential to enliven the educational process. I can think of few disciplines throughout the humanities, social sciences, and sciences without an important contribution to this debate.

Third, the study and its implementation as policy and curriculum would be an act of real leadership. Nearly every college and university claims to offer "excellence" in one way or another. Mostly the word is invoked by unimaginative academic officials who want their institution to be like some other. And for those so emulated, prestige, like barnacles on the hull of a ship, limit institutional velocity and mobility. Real excellence in an age of cataclysmic potentials, consists neither in imitation nor timidity. College and university officials with courage and vision have the power to lead in the transition to a sustainable future. Within their communities, their institutions have visibility, respect, and buying power. What they do matters to a large number of people. How they spend their institutional budget counts for a great deal in the regional economy. Through alumni, they reach present leaders; through students they reach those of the future. All of which is to say that colleges and universities are leverage institutions. They can help create a humane and livable future, rather than remaining passively on the sidelines, poised to study the outcome.

Not without irony, those who presume to defend the liberal arts in the fashion of Allan Bloom have undersold them. A genuinely liberal education will produce whole persons with intellectual breadth, able to think at right angles to their major field; practical persons able to act competently; and persons of deep commitment, willing to roll up their sleeves and join the struggle to build a humane and sustainable world. They will not be merely well-read. Rather, they will be ecologically literate citizens able to distinguish health from its opposite and to live accordingly. Above all, they will make themselves relevant to the crisis of our age, which in its various manifestations is about the care, nurturing, and enhancement of life. And life is the only defensible foundation of a liberal education.